This award, under the auspices of the Small Grants for Exploratory Research (SGER) program, will use funds to collect a series of cores from Lake Albert in East Africa. The investigator and an undergraduate student will travel to Lake Albert and collect a suite of Kullenberg piston cores from the deepest waters of Lake Albert, ship the cores to the publicly accessible National Limnological Research Center at the University of Minnesota, develop a chronology for the cores, complete isotopic and morphological analyses of charred grass epidermis in these cores to assess the relative contribution of C3 and C4 grass species in the region, and examine shifts in grass species in conjunction with various proxies of climatic and environmental conditions.
Lake Albert is located within the western Rift and is well sited to record shifts in the relative contributions of Atlantic and Indian Ocean moisture sources to the African monsoon as well as changes in the hydrologic input among the various equatorial African lakes that feed the Nile River. Previous research has shown East African lakes to be sensitive to abrupt decadal-scale variability in climate and environmental conditions and unique recorders of such change. New and well-dated sediment cores from Lake Albert could provide critical, yet missing, details of this climatic behavior.
In a previous award (i.e., ATM-9912052/0196564), Beuning was funded by the Paleoclimate Program to analyze fossil grass cuticles from East African lakes to better understand changes in the relative extent of C3 and C4 grass distribution in tropical Africa over time. The award was made at a reduced budget and scope of work to allow Beuning to hone her analytical techniques for the isotopic analyses of cuticles. As a result, Beuning left Lake Albert off the list of research sites. In the intervening years, however, Beuning has successfully proved her isotopic techniques.
As chance would have it, a commercial seismic expedition is being conducted on Lake Albert in the spring of 2003. Beuning has been offered several days of ship time on the RV Kilindi to core the lake. No local vessels on the lake are sufficient for coring so, the commercial expedition is an opportunity to cost-effectively leverage private and public funds to achieve a significant payoff for the international community of paleoclimtic researchers. With a small financial investment, the wider scientific community could benefit from a new and publicly accessible paleoclimatic archive.
